Foul-Mouthed Wisecracks Lead to Twitter Sitcom

Twitter has passed another milestone on its way to cultural domination by spawning its first television show.

CBS, the American network, will make a comedy series based on a Twitter account that has has gained more than 720,000 followers in only a few months. The site (WARNING: link contains obscenities) is called Sh** My Dad Says, and it's the brain child of 29-year-old Justin Halpern.

Halpern moved back in with his parents in San Diego and decided to feature the profane and acerbic comments of Samuel, his 73-year-old father, in a Twitter feed. He has been scribbling down his dad’s rants in a notebook since childhood.

Within weeks of the feed going live on August 3, with pearls of wisdom such as "The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out," it became a Twitter sensation, with thousands signing up daily to follow the stream of wisecracks and bitter putdowns meted out by Mr Halpern Sr.

News of the television deal came as Twitter extended its links with other social networking sites to include LinkedIn. The business-oriented social network, which has 50 million members, will allow people to share updates and tweets across both sites.

Twitter has become a cultural phenomenon, derided and lauded in equal measure, as celebrities, companies and individuals have flocked to its site. Estimates put the number of monthly users at more than 40 million. Last month Microsoft began to integrate Twitter messages into Bing, its new search engine, and Google announced a deal to do the same.